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You thought I’d forgotten about the clutter, didn’t you?
Or - worse - that I’d let it get the better of me.
Not so - armed with this fantastic book
and the realisation that my personal vendetta against clutter fits in magnificently with all six Star Wars films, I’ve spent a good part of the last two weeks kicking clutter’s ass. Clutter Wars has begun! And up first - The Phantom Menace.
What is The Phantom Menace? Let me show you by example. This was my hallway a little while back.
Now, being entirely fair - that isn’t really how my hallway normally looked. I mean, it was pretty bad - there were always bags and shoes thrown around all over the place, we had a broken lamp that had found a home there for months, and all sorts of random stuff would just appear there from day to day and never decide to leave - but if I’m completely honest a lot of the stuff in this picture came from one of the most evil places known to man: the cupboard under the stairs.
The cupboard under the stairs is everybody’s little secret. The problem is that ‘out of sight, out of mind’ is such a forgiving mistress. Got a problem with clutter in your house? Easy - shove it all into the cupboard under the stairs.
Even obsessive-compulsive Monica from Friends suffered from this problem. And it’s not just the stair cupboard, either - it’s ANY cupboard in any room big enough to handle your crap.
In the kitchen this will be the one directly under the sink. It’s the same in the bathroom, which also suffers the misery of the medicine cabinet, too. We have three medicine cabinets spread over two bathrooms. Three! And they’re all groaning under the weight of the Pareto principle, inasmuch as we use 20 per cent of the products in there 80 per cent of the time. The rest, give or take an item or two, is junk.
Are you like me in that you often keep medicines sometimes for years after their expiry date, on the off-chance that you might get SO ill you’re trapped in the home and anything is better than nothing? What is THAT all about?
All bedrooms suffer the misery of wardrobes, who are forced to endure sometimes a decade’s worth of old clothes that are so awful you wouldn’t even be buried in them. But yet, they’re too good to throw away. “You never know…” you tell yourself, even though yes, you really do.
And even the airing cupboard can be a great place to hide things away - old broken brooms and tools, your enormous collection of towels and sheets that just sit there gathering dust, random keys and bric-a-brac, and pretty much anything that couldn’t possibly be squeezed into anywhere else.
All of these places have dirty secrets. All have things you desire to hide away. All are filled to the brim with your lies.
But, here’s the thing - none of them are The Phantom Menace. None of them are really the problem.
The problem is me. I am the Phantom Menace. I am the person who subscribes wholeheartedly to the principle of ‘out of sight, out of mind’, and decides that clutter unseen is not clutter at all.
Except, of course, it is, because eventually one of two things happen:
- You fill your cupboards with so much clutter that they become full
- You decide you want to move (probably because of the problem with the cupboards)
And what then? You have to move the clutter all over again, except this time there’s nowhere for it to go. Sure, you could buy or build more cupboards, but that’s crazy talk. So you decide to throw it all out. If it’s been in here all these years, you say, we can’t possibly need it! Everything must go!
But hold on there, sunshine, your wife knows that the three most important things she’s ever owned are buried somewhere in those cupboards. And now you know, because she’s just told you. Loudly, and with a steely glare.
You can’t just grab a dozen bin bags and chuck it all away, as per your original plan. No, no, no - that would be far too easy. Instead, you have to go through everything by hand and microscope, trying to find those three most important things. How items of such life-changing magnitude ever made their way betwixt and between the rest of the junk in your cupboards is lost on her but magnificently irritating to you.
Hours/days/weeks/months later, you’ve gone through all the rubbish you’ve ever owned and finally - thankfully - you’ve located her stuff. With great relief, secure in the knowledge that everything else can be binned, you carefully collect her belongings and walk them over to where she sits.
‘Where do you want these?’ you ask.
‘Oh,’ she says, not even looking up from her book, ‘Just put them on the side for now.’
See, the thing is, it’s all well and good doing that thing we all do every 3-6 months where the clutter gets on top of you to the point where you go mad for about four days, chucking away everything in site whilst stuffing the rest into every nook and cranny your home can manage. But this is just a short-term solution to a long-term problem. And that problem is our lives.
If you don’t figure out why you’re a clutterer, and you don’t figure out how to stop it, all that will happen - and if you think about it, all that ever happens - is your momentary lapse into super-clean mode will be just that: a moment, at least relative to the other months and years when clutter has you in its grip of death.
The first part is holding your hand up and admitting you have a problem. Repeat after me: ‘I am the Phantom Menace. I caused the clutter. Me. The clutter didn’t cause itself. That would be stupid. No, I did it. And I’m the only one who can stop doing it.’
Good. Now think about why you horde stuff. Why you let things build up into such a mess. Why you’re keeping four almost-empty bottles of bleach by the toilet. And why you still have a four-year old TV guide in your magazine pile.
Why?
The reasons - nay, excuses - why we hold on to things are many and varied.
Examples include:
- I might need it someday
- I paid good money for that
- It was a gift from a friend
- It has sentimental value
- It might be worth something
- I’m too busy (i.e., I’m lazy)
- I don’t want to admit I made a mistake
To combat this way of thinking, we can flip the ‘why?’ around and look at it backwards, asking specific questions about the reasons why we’re holding on to this stuff:
- Have I used this item in the last 6-12 months?
- If I got rid of it, how much would it cost to replace?
- Before I found it, just now, did I remember I even owned it?
- Does it make me happy?
- Does it reflect my current lifestyle, home or interests?
- Does it still work?
- Does it still fit?
Look at the things that make up your clutter and cast your mind over the excuses further up this article, and then re-analyse what you own by asking the questions above. By doing this, you can hopefully being to interpret the deeper reasons that lay inside of you about why you horde to excess, and once that pattern begins in your mind it is a fairly simple process to then begin throwing stuff out.
As for me, here is how my hallway looks now:
Much better. I moved a desk in from another room, freeing up some space there. This desk now also works as a convenient mantle for a telephone and our ‘key bowl’ - which has now come out of its previous hotspot in the kitchen, which was clutter personified as a result. Additionally, the four drawers in the desk currently look after pens (and other stationery), fast food brochures and telephone books. Which keeps all that stuff out of the living room, where it routinely used to crop up. Better - now I always know where a pen is.
Fifty per cent of the hallway cupboard has been thrown out - the rest is on its way.
I’ve sold and I’m selling a bunch of stuff on eBay, including my ‘collection’ of sports magazines. I realised midweek that not only was it getting out of control, but that I really didn’t need to hold on to five years of stuff. Worst case scenario: if I wake up one day and decide I really, really need to read an article I remember from one of them, I can almost certainly Google it (or buy a back issue).
This past week I also dumped an old broken portable TV, a working video player (hadn’t been used in years), a couple of lamps and my bedside chest of drawers (which looked like a bomb had gone off in it - twice).
I also threw out three bin bags of clothes that I never, or rarely wore.
Finally, we’ve plans to attend a boot sale next week - out goes a ton of books, magazines, clothes, general bric-a-brac and whatever else we can ditch on to other really wonderful people. We’ve even got the kids excited about getting rid of their old toys, which is nothing short of a miracle.
Psychologically, I’m trying to make other changes too. For example, I will no longer buy 3-4 books at a time from Amazon, because all that happens is you read 1-2 and then lose interest in the others.
Because my bedside chest is now gone, I’ve moved all of my ‘daily clothes’ to the drawers under my side of the bed. This is convenient for me and it also means my side of the room is free of any and all furniture.
When I’ve finished a magazine - unless it’s an absolute doozy, and that’s a case of being completely honest with yourself - then it goes straight in to the recycling bin.
Decluttering is both an art and a science. It’s not good enough to just throw a few things out once in a while - you need to realise why you hold on to things that you know, deep-down (or maybe higher) that you don’t need or even want. Once you’ve figured that out, it’s a question of being true to yourself and staying with it.
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